We ran manual sharding on our vector DB for months—it honestly felt like an endless firefight. Hotspots popping up constantly, exhausting weekend resharding marathons, and painfully slow schema changes. Recently switched to a managed, shard-free cloud solution, and wow—the difference is night and day. Finally, I can spend my energy building my actual solution instead of babysitting databases!
Sharding can hinder your business growth, especially for all AI startups.
Prepare for scalability with a non-sharded architecture from the start.
While manual sharding definitely creates tech debt for AI startups, I think the issue isn't sharding itself but how it's managed.